Baptiste v. State

An
Appeal under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.141(b)(2)
from the Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Miguel de la O,
Judge. Lower Tribunal No. 89-49032 A.

Ronel
Jean Baptiste, in proper person.

Ashley
Moody, Attorney General, for appellee.

Before
HENDON, MILLER, and LOBREE, JJ.

HENDON, J.

Ronel
Jean Baptiste ("defendant") seeks to reverse the
trial court's March 2019 denial of his motion to vacate
or correct an illegal sentence pursuant to Florida Rule of
Criminal Procedure 3.850(b). We affirm.

In this
appeal from denial of postconviction relief, the defendant
raises a challenge to both his conviction and his habitual
offender sentences. The challenge to the final judgment of
conviction, however, is not cognizable via Florida Rule of
Criminal Procedure 3.850(b), and indeed his conviction was
affirmed on appeal in 1993. Baptiste v. State, 624
So.2d 730 (Fla. 3d DCA 1993). His claim that the case should
have been brought in juvenile court has since been fully
litigated, and we decline to address it further. The
defendant next asserts that his habitual felony offender
sentences are illegal because he committed the predicate
offenses when he was a juvenile and thus those convictions
cannot be used to qualify him for habitual offender
sentencing. We find this claim is without legal merit.

The
defendant was convicted and sentenced in 1991 as a habitual
violent felony offender for the 1989 non-homicide offenses of
armed robbery, armed kidnapping, and armed burglary. He was
sentenced to thirty years with a ten-year mandatory minimum
for Counts I and II, the armed robbery and armed burglary,
and to life in prison with a fifteen-year mandatory minimum
on Count III, the armed kidnapping. The convictions were
affirmed on appeal. Id. In a subsequent
post-conviction motion, the defendant raised the issue that
his sentences were illegal under Graham v. Florida,
560 U.S. 48 (2010), [1] because he was a juvenile at the time he
committed the offenses. In May 2011, the trial court held an
evidentiary hearing and determined that the defense proved by
a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant was indeed
a juvenile at the time of the offenses, entitling him to
relief under Graham, but only as to the life
sentence for armed kidnapping. At the subsequent sentencing
hearing, the court appropriately vacated the life sentence
for the armed kidnapping conviction pursuant to
Graham and resentenced the defendant to thirty years
in prison with a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence. The
court noted that the remaining sentences were unaffected by
Graham and re-imposed habitual violent felony
offender classification for those counts. The defendant did
not appeal.

The
defendant's record shows that he was sentenced as a
habitual felony offender based on several prior felony
offenses.[2] On Graham resentencing in 2011,
the defense agreed to waive any renewed testimony as to the
defendant's status as a habitual offender and stipulated
that the trial court could rely on the transcript from the
original 1991 sentencing. Furthermore, at that hearing, the
defendant admitted on the record to having given false names
and birthdates in each of those prior offenses, which
resulted in his convictions and sentences as an adult in
those cases. By failing to raise a timely objection to the
filing of charges in adult court, he waived the right to
challenge those convictions. See State v. Griffith,
675 So.2d 911 (Fla. 1996); Williams v. State, 754
So.2d 67, 69 (Fla. 4th DCA 2000) (holding a defendant can
waive his or her right to be treated as a juvenile by
silence; lying about one's age to secure a desired bond
coupled with a failure to disclose one's true age at the
plea conference also amounts to a waiver of such a right);
Smith v. State, 345 So.2d 1080, 1082 (Fla. 3d DCA
1977) (holding that where a defendant voluntarily submits to
the jurisdiction of the circuit court's adult division,
pleads guilty, does not appeal, and accepts the benefits
therefrom, he is estopped from later changing his position
and challenging the court's jurisdiction). Thus, the
habitual offender sentences imposed in Case No. 89-49032 are
not illegal. The defendant's remaining arguments are
without merit.

Affirmed.

---------

Notes:

[1] The U.S. Supreme Court in
Graham prohibited life without parole sentences for
juveniles convicted of ...

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